# PPT: token-Pruned Pose Transformer for monocular and multi-view human pose estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08194 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08194/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14503/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Q-BERT: Hessian Based Ultra Low Precision Quantization of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05840/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00134/) (2016)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images using Multiview Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07809/) (2017)
- [AdaViT: Adaptive Vision Transformers for Efficient Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15668/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Token Reduction Should Go Beyond Efficiency in Generative Models -- From Vision, Language to Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18227/) (2025)
- [Realistic Full-Body Tracking from Sparse Observations via Joint-Level Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08855/) (2023)
- [TORE: Token Reduction for Efficient Human Mesh Recovery with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10705/) (2022)
- [Peeling the Onion: Hierarchical Reduction of Data Redundancy for Efficient Vision Transformer Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10801/) (2022)
- [CVTHead: One-shot Controllable Head Avatar with Vertex-feature Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06443/) (2023)
- [TEMPO: Efficient Multi-View Pose Estimation, Tracking, and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07910/) (2023)
- [Hourglass Tokenizer for Efficient Transformer-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12028/) (2023)
- [Identity-Aware Hand Mesh Estimation and Personalization from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10840/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-view Anomaly Detection with Efficient Adaptive Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11935/) (2024)
- [All Keypoints You Need: Detecting Arbitrary Keypoints on the Body of Triple, High, and Long Jump Athletes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02939/) (2023)
- [HaMuCo: Hand Pose Estimation via Multiview Collaborative Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00988/) (2023)
- [Not Every Patch is Needed: Towards a More Efficient and Effective Backbone for Video-based Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16811/) (2025)
- [GTPT: Group-based Token Pruning Transformer for Efficient Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10756/) (2024)
- [H2OT: Hierarchical Hourglass Tokenizer for Efficient Video Pose Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06956/) (2025)
- [Occluded Human Pose Estimation based on Limb Joint Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09885/) (2024)
- [Multi-View Industrial Anomaly Detection with Epipolar Constrained Cross-View Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11088/) (2025)
- [Geometry-Biased Transformer for Robust Multi-View 3D Human Pose Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17106/) (2023)
- [DHRNet: A Dual-Path Hierarchical Relation Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14025/) (2024)
- [PO-GUISE+: Pose and object guided transformer token selection for efficient driver action recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13750/) (2024)
- [RUMPL: Ray-Based Transformers for Universal Multi-View 2D to 3D Human Pose Lifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15488/) (2025)
- [MamKPD: A Simple Mamba Baseline for Real-Time 2D Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01422/) (2024)
- [Unconstrained Multi-view Human Pose Estimation with Algebraic Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24312/) (2026)
- [Distilling Token-Pruned Pose Transformer for 2D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05548/) (2023)
- [RSB-Pose: Robust Short-Baseline Binocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Occlusion Handling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14242/) (2023)
- [Self-learning Canonical Space for Multi-view 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12440/) (2024)
- [C-DOG: Multi-View Multi-instance Feature Association Using Connected δ-Overlap Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14095/) (2025)
- [HandMvNet: Real-Time 3D Hand Pose Estimation Using Multi-View Cross-Attention Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, the vision transformer and its variants have played an increasingly important role in both monocular and multi-view human pose estimation. Considering image patches as tokens, transformers can model the global dependencies within the entire image or across images from other views. However, global attention is computationally expensive. As a consequence, it is difficult to scale up these transformer-based methods to high-resolution features and many views. In this paper, we propose the token-Pruned Pose Transformer (PPT) for 2D human pose estimation, which can locate a rough human mask and performs self-attention only within selected tokens. Furthermore, we extend our PPT to multi-view human pose estimation. Built upon PPT, we propose a new cross-view fusion strategy, called human area fusion, which considers all human foreground pixels as corresponding candidates. Experimental results on COCO and MPII demonstrate that our PPT can match the accuracy of previous pose transformer methods while reducing the computation. Moreover, experiments on Human 3.6M and Ski-Pose demonstrate that our Multi-view PPT can efficiently fuse cues from multiple views and achieve new state-of-the-art results.